Keeping It Real

Capsule:  What useful media legacies will the 2000-2009 decade claim?  With a powerful surge of digital media soaring like a tsunami over traditional media forms, what can the media mash-up that's left teach?  Are we finally grown-up enough to admit our new realism?  What hard-earned wisdom have we earned as we rebuild the media in the decade ahead?

Forbes.com


For those still standing as we enter 2010, and even for those laid waste by the last decade's digital surge, it's a good moment to force a useful idea structure over the hodge-podge of media events we've just survived. We must have mastered something in the volatility and media shape-shifts of the last ten years--or, at least, it would be pretty to think so.

Here are a few observations on our post-2009 New Realism courtesy of a digital media mix that strongly influences the way we think, live and work.

TV News and TV News Blogs

Among the many TV News networks brought to us by cable, satellite, telco TV and the internet, a few real news choices persist in presenting the world as a fair representation of life.  TV News is both an art and a business for PBS, the BBC, Bloomberg News, EuroNews, regional cable news channels like Cablevision's News 12 and (most of the time) CNN--to name a representative group.  TV News, like its print and radio counterparts at NPR, PRI, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, is expensive.  It takes money to maintain international news bureaus and to report on the world with patience and knowledgeable intensity. 

TV News Blogs, like Fox News, MSNBC, much of CNBC and a lot of broadcast news, don't report the news in the traditional sense that aims at objectivity.  Fox, MSNBC, CNBC and kindred cable and broadcast spirits offer thought leadership in the best sense and opinion uninstructed by context in the worst. 

International coverage differentiates real news from news blogs in this newly realistic world.  If a TV news network staffs international news bureaus--as distinct from jetting correspondents around the globe when a high-profile headline emerges--it's likely a source of real news.  As we've seen through wars, social and religious conflicts and the recession of the last decade, events around the world affect our daily lives just like our behavior in our own backyard affects the rest of the planet.  Real news thinks globally even when it acts locally. 

Of course, there's nothing wrong with news blogs, provided we keep them real enough to understand that we're immersing ourselves in opinion instead of getting as close to the facts--the ultimate reality--as we can.  News is the opposite of entertainment in terms of the cost of capturing real life: in the news, the more real the network, the more expensive the news-gathering process; in entertainment, reality TV is cheap and abundant.

May Carry, Must Pay

Despite the best of public intentions, the media burst out of the constraints of government regulation more during this last digital decade than at any time in media history.  Regulations that require multi-channel distributors to carry local broadcasters seem arcane even as they persist.  The idea of providing advantages to one commercial TV source over another--in this case, providing advantages to broadcast networks and their affiliated TV stations over other cable or internet based entertainment and information sources--is inconsistent with network neutrality at its core.  Regulators can no longer keep ahead of the development force bringing media diversity to American audiences.

The task for the FCC is to stay broad and to attempt a fair perspective as events continue to change the world.  At the same time, relationships between media companies have become increasingly private and commercial.  Even public broadcasters are sharing resources with a widening network of commercial TV channels, radio stations, news services and bloggers.  When the FCC attempts to regulate one medium, it must take into account its interlocking dependencies with the media whole.  This was an easier task when analog media and its capital requirements kept the number of participants small and the field broadly visible.

One of the emerging truths in this new real media world is that TV content can no longer assume a guaranteed right to be carried on every distribution network it desires.  Must carry has turned into may carry, must pay.  The pay part is simple.  If we've learned anything in the last decade, it's that media content costs money and someone has to pass the bill along to the consuming public, either directly or through the government.  Advertising alone is insufficient; there's just too much advertising available for it to be a dependable link to consumer revenue for each advertiser/investor.

In the name of keeping it real, even the most non-commercial of commercial media are getting wise to the idea that we've got to link to real customers and ask them for more support in order to pay for growth.  A few actors in the commercial sphere who dislike getting engaged in real commerce would like to reimagine themselves as fitting into an expanded public TV or radio model, even if their medium is print.  The requirements of the marketplace will determine how big the digital public media model will get; but no matter how you look at it, we've all been forced into the messy and interestingly self-regulating business of transacting with our customers for ongoing support.  Most likely, public and private media will start to look remarkably similar for the strenuous customer relationship-tending each will require.

Broadband is the Internet

For most American consumers, the internet is a vast value-laden marketplace brought into their homes and businesses by a cable or telephone company through broadband service.  The broadband pipes that cable MSO's and telco providers have built and continue to upgrade and maintain are not paid for through taxes or pledge campaigns.  The commercial enterprises that sell customers broadband service pay local, state and federal taxes, passing subscription dollars back to the government in exchange for their right to operate.

Although alternative forms of internet access exist--both dial-up and free wireless networks are an intermittently reliable internet source--most of the country benefits from the networks built into private homes, apartments and businesses by companies like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and AT&T. These distribution giants will stand behind their substantial broadband investments. They will work with the FCC to ensure that net neutrality means keeping broadband distribution reasonably open to the majority of service and content applications according to rules that don't injure broadband's
commercial existence. They won't give away their capacity and they will work to ensure that regulation is, except in the most extreme circumstances,
benign.

Learning from the last decade's unwitting destruction of substantial media, intellectual and societal value (think the advertising value crash that brought down newspapers and, to a degree, magazines and broadcast TV,) an interlocking private/public partnership will be forged.  In this way, government and business can give each other and the people they serve fair warning of what they may lose if new media ingests old media and serves it back, in the most extreme examples, as lightning-fast digital noise.

TV Content and Advertising Change the Face of the Internet

The advertising formats to which we've become accustomed are due to change.  The advertising market crash we're still experiencing is forcing the development of new formats for internet and TV advertising.  These new ad forms are most likely to resemble the interactive TV we've all dreamed of, energized by the best of Amazonian commerce and Google-ized search.

Because effective TV advertising is expensive, whether it's brought to audiences via multi-channel TV or multi-channel-TV-delivered-broadband, a new advertising market is being created as an outgrowth of our last digital development decade.  The new ad market will include expensive interactive TV advertising riding multiple distribution networks, delivering the promise of aspirational fulfillment powered by the impulse for immediate gratification. 

The best and the brightest of our new media decade will devote both creative and commercial muscle to developing the new TV landscape for content and content-rich ads across multiple forms.  New HD streaming capabilities--think disruptive peer-to-peer technologies like those of Dyyno.com--will become new home and business shopping services.  Product placement and interactive advertising will finally step to the plate to deliver high-end commercial value.  

A new ecosystem of interactive TV advertising and rich narrative content built according to the formats that the internet and discrete closed network systems can deliver will create the next sustainable media environment, rich enough to coax the most valuable of the dying media formats of our last decade back to life.  Alternatively, we can spend the next ten years trying to figure out what knowledge-based and cultural roles we want content and distribution to play, while we numb out on reality as entertainment and news as opinion in a backwards media world.